Maps, Models, and New Modalities: What Do Digital Literary Studies Do?

The ongoing debate about what digital humanities are has led us astray from the question of what these disciplines do. Digital literary studies doesn't look much like contemporary literary studies because of a long-standing opposition between numeric systems and humanistic approaches to argument, depth and textual close reading. But these don't need to be opposing sides of a coin. In this talk, Martin Eve will cover the ways in which contemporary digital literary studies are operating and talk about how their quantitative findings can be synthesised with the arguments of more conventional literary studies and how a generational shift is occurring in DH towards machine learning models.